A new report from KLAS delivers some interesting, if not surprising, news: Smaller hospitals are considering large clinical information system (CIS) vendors over vendors that traditionally service the community hospital segment of the market.
One of the drivers for this shift in vendor selection by smaller hospitals - defined as having 150 or fewer beds - appears to be the meaningful use requirements for EHRs. Perhaps these hospitals, which have fewer resources than their larger counterparts, feel that muscle of the big CIS vendors in meeting meaningful use requirements is a worthy tradeoff for the big investment. Perhaps part of the strategy is if you’re going to make any kind of investment, you might as well eliminate as many risks as possible.
Of course, the subtext for this line of reasoning for the game-changing behavior is that the community vendors aren't being looked upon as being able to meet meaningful use for these hospitals. Is this happening in your community hospital's health IT decision making?
There are other hypotheses. Hosted offerings make sense from an economical standpoint. Another reason is that community hospital leaders may be thinking beyond to interoperability requirements for meaningful use. If you have to make a big health IT investment and endure the painful cultural changes and workflow re-engineering, does it make sense to implement a system that large local hospitals have? It seems reasonable.
The only potentially head-scratching data point from the report is that some community hospitals are looking at Epic. In the world of Epic, hospitals have to partner with larger hospitals in order to be considered a potential customer. But if you consider the interoperability logic, it's not such a head-scratcher after all.
Photo by Cindy Funk courtesy of Creative Commons license.
